From: ConnerSF-AT-aol.com
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 1997 20:07:17 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re:  Re: "Independence Day"



In a message dated 8/23/97 6:41:44 PM, you wrote:

<<>If all this sounds a little like a Frankfurt School jeremiad, well, okay
>then....maybe it's time we brought back a little Adornoesque pessimism into
>our postmodernist theoretical playhouses.

Hi David--

Loved your thoughts, but I don't think we're in Frankfurt anymore: In 60s
America it was "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". In the 90's its "Guess Who's
Saving Corporate America":

Isn't "Independence Day" starring Will Smith & Jeff Goldblum, one of those
queer miscegenation fantasies of a post racist America that liberal
Hollywood loves to cook up every now and then? In this wet dream, Blacks
and Jews have now been properly incorporated into the military industrial
complex and are no longer at each other's throats, victims of white
supremacy or are outsider purveyors of left wing insurgency. In ID, we have
Jewish brains and Black brawn together, enlisted to save Corporate America
from those less domesticated dark hordes bent on destroying the American
way of life--! I mean if Hollywood can make movies about benevolent Nazi
Capitalists saving Jews from annihilation, than Independence Day is a
sequel in which the favor is returned by the now liberated B & Js who
rescue imperiled capital from those third world hordes who are not as nice
as the Nazis were..."If we all can't have air conditioners and cell
phones--than no-one will have them" BOOM!! It used to be just "paint the
White House black" now it's destroy the muthafucka!

And we can't have that...now can we...

Cheers, Jeffrey Skoller
>>

I'm afraid I've let the provocative and insightful comments from Mr. Skoller
get a little bit cold before responding to them.  So in lieu of dragging the
dead horse of ID4 back into in the fray, I thought I'd try to tie this thread
to a more recent, but no less stale, to my mind, instance of the postmodern
genre film - the eugenicist fantasy/nightmare, Mimic.

While I'm not exactly sure what I want to make of this film, given that its
racial tropes have a kind of Sirkian hyper-obviousness to them, I think it
might stand as yet another version of white technocracy's triumph over the
parasitic hordes with-the-aid-of/at-the-expense-of a complexly mediated "B&J"
alliance.  It seems that F. Murray Abraham's archetypal patriarch of
"socially responsible" science is racialized clearly enough, but would I be
off the mark to read Mira Sorvino's infertile (?) yupster husband as Jewishly
coded as well?  Given its almost hysterical concern for the future of the
race along with its dominant hermeneutic of excavation (the descent into a
lost urban history via the subway tunnels), the film appears, on several
levels, to be interested in probing the specific historical unconscious of
whiteness.

The entire film, in fact, seems to be saturated with images culled from a
nineteenth century repertoire of racial fantasies: from the Dickensian
opening scenes, chock full of ethereally dying white children, to the
carapace/masks of the bugs themselves which seem like grotesque
turn-of-the-century caricatures of Jewish physiognomy.

But what interested and disturbed me most about this film, though, was its
organizing trope of mimesis.  Mimesis, of course, has had a long history of
being deployed in colonial discourse as a term of the colonizers' naturalized
superiority: observing indigenous peoples' tendency to copy the clothing and
gestures of the colonizers is made to provide evidence of the relative
"immaturity" of the other's culture.  Given the free play that mimickry has
in the film - the autistic Mexican boy's capacity to "imitate anything"
(including whiteness by the film's end?), the bugs' ability to "mimic their
predators" - these historical associations between race and mimesis threaten
to run riot through the text.  Free associating off of Jeff's comments by way
of Michael Rogin's Blackface/White Noise, one might also note how 19th
century minstrelsy also provided a way for Jews to perform a kind of
"whiteness" precisely through miming an abjectly racist image of blackness.
 Can the martyring of the heroic black cop (as he walks down the tracks of an
"underground railroad", singing what sounds like a slave spiritual) be read
as another analogous instance of the production of a fantasmatic whiteness
through the evocation and elimination of an equally fantastic image of
blackness?

Again, I'm really not sure where these speculations might lead us, but it
seems that what is "monstrous" (in Judith Halberstam's sense of the term)
about these buggy confections of white technoscience is precisely their
Frankensteinian hybridity - their ability to trouble a racializing discourse
through an uncanny ability to imitate and mutate, blurring the categories
that would keep the "species" separate and distinct.  Although the threat has
been ostensibly contained by the reactive closure of the film, what can we
make of Mira's husband's uncanny resemblance to the bugs as he emerges from
the tunnel, with head bowed and wrapped in a coccoon-like blanket?; and what
can we make of the Mexican boy's insinuation of himself into the enclosing
heart of white, bourgeois familialism?

David Conner
History of Consciousness
UC Santa Cruz


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